iPads and Kindles will never replace the printed page, Joanna Trollope has
suggested, because “you cannot love a library of e-books”.

The best-selling author said it was impossible to furnish a room with a library of electronic novels in the same way as a study filled with bound works.

She also claimed the rise of e-books was “homogenising” literature by putting the works of Leo Tolstoy and Katie Price, the glamour model, on the same screen.

Trollope, known for so-called Aga sagas such as The Choir and A Village Affair, said that feeling the weight of a book in the hand and seeing its cover was a vital part of the reading experience. She is chairing the judging panel of this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction and read all 143 submissions in their printed form.

“I read everything in an actual book,” she said. “I have an iPad, but I realised almost immediately that the iPad homogenises all books. Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

“The iPad is a wonderful toy and the Kindle is a brilliant thing to travel with — never again will one find oneself on a Sunday night in Detroit airport with nothing to read — but they are just another way of reading. Discernment is very important. And to get it you have to feel the heft of a book in your hand. You have to know that you are not reading Katie Price, you are reading War and Peace.”

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Price, otherwise known as Jordan, has released a series of ghost-written “chick-lit” novels.

Trollope’s own novels are available for e-readers and she described the technology as “very practical”.

But she added: “You can’t love a library of e-books. You can’t furnish a room with e-books. I look around my study [at the Orange Prize submissions] and I’m going to miss these tottering piles, I really am.”

Her comments echo those of Jonathan Franzen, the US novelist, who has argued that authors who send their books into the world “printed in ink, on paper” deserve to have them read in the same format.

Some commentators have predicted the death of the printed book, claiming that children who grow up with e-books will grow attached to the technology.

But Trollope said: “I don’t think we should worry. There is a great excitement at the moment [about e-books] but I’m not sure we’ll be so excited in three years’ time. And children like books. They like looking at a line of Anthony Horowitzes and saying, 'I’ve read every one of those’.”

She suggested that publishers respond to the rise of e-books by making printed books feel precious. “Publishers may have to produce fewer books, and more beautiful books,” she said.

She described judging the Orange Prize as an “absolutely wonderful and cheering” experience because of the high quality of women’s fiction.

The author dismissed the “intellectual snobbery” behind criticism of Dame Stella Rimington, the former MI5 chief who was pilloried for citing “readability” as her criteria for judging last year’s Man Booker Prize. “The criteria for the Orange Prize is excellence, originality and accessibility, and I don’t think readability is any different from accessibility,” said Trollope.

“I admire wildly intelligent, arcane novels but personally I’m not up to reading them. My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are of equal importance. I see no point in reading fiction that’s available only to people with PhDs and dictionaries.

“The thing intellectual snobs are terrified of is 'populist’, which is very different from 'popular’.”

Trollope and her fellow judges must whittle down the contenders to a short list of six, to be announced on April 17. She likened the process to losing weight: “The first bit is much the fastest.”